


Quite Contrary

by hitlikehammers



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Alternate Canon, Alternate Universe, Chapter-Specific Warnings in the Author's Notes at the Beginning of the Chapters in Question, F/M, Gen, M/M, Multi, What Ifs and the Like
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-18
Updated: 2014-01-01
Packaged: 2018-01-05 01:13:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 17,125
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1087850
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hitlikehammers/pseuds/hitlikehammers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Who is Mary Morstan, and how does she fit?</p><p>Ten (largely unrelated) speculative variations on the theme.</p><p> </p><p>  <span class="small">(Full Disclosure: nearly all of these presume some degree of a John/Sherlock dynamic, and do <i>not</i> include infidelity within existing relationships.)</span></p>
            </blockquote>





	1. In Which Mary is A War Widow

**Author's Note:**

> Unbeta'ed? Yes. Un-Britpicked? Yes. Unrealistic? Yeah, mostly. 
> 
> Come on, friends. Play along with me. Mary's here—she deserves some love.
> 
> In the interest of full disclosure: I'm mostly interested in how Mary fits within a John/Sherlock (or at least a John&Sherlock) dynamic, while still being respected as a three-dimensional character.
> 
> And frankly, these _ideas_. They need to leave my head. I have other things to do.
> 
> So, there you go. Obviously, I have very little shame.

She comes up behind him on the balcony, arms folded across her chest against the chill, the memories. His shoulders heave with breaths too deep and she feels the tightness in her chest building, sympathetic: she knows those kind of quiet sobs.

“His name was Luka,” she says, leaning against the doorframe, and John doesn’t turn to her, barely twitches to acknowledge the words, those words: that name she never speaks, but she knows.

John’s listening.

“He was an adrenaline junkie,” Mary continues, stares at nothing as she fingers the loose threads of her cardigan. “Our first date ended on his Ducati,” she smiles despite herself, remembering the wind against her face, the way momentum tugged at her cheeks; the shape of his body against her own. 

“We would go skydiving together. That’s how we met,” she closes her eyes and breathes in deep. “My thirtieth birthday. Overdue for a quarter-life crisis, but not quite to midlife, or so one hopes,” she laughs, and it’s not entirely devoid of humour, of the lightness from before, the kind she’s trailed with her recklessly, never knowing it was fleeting. 

“I flew to Honolulu. The Telegraph had a feature, world’s best locations for skydiving and bungee—” She pauses, shakes her head: details. 

Not now.

“He was my instructor,” she finishes, and notices that John’s breathing is even. She would dare a step forward, if not for what she still has to say.

“He was an Army Ranger.” She swallows hard, remembers the cut of his uniform and his voice against the words of the Creed. “Deployed to Iraq.” 

Her heart is beating heavy, slow: funereal. It does that, when she thinks of him, of the end.

“They never found him,” she whispers, leaning heavy against the harsh line of hinges, relishing the bite into her skin: real. Unforgiving.

“Missing in Action,” she breathes: “It’s almost worse,” and it is, it really _is_ , and that’s what no one understands, what she could never put into words quite right. “Never knowing, not for sure.”

John shivers, and she knows he feels it. Knows it. Doesn’t require better words than that.

“I loved him,” Mary speaks softly. “With everything I had.”

A step. She takes a step from the door.

“I think,” and a step, another step, father out: “It always felt like he gave me the same.”

Closer, now, she can see the tiny tremors, subtle shifts as John inhales, the hitch before he exhales. She wants to reach out but not yet. 

Not yet.

“I don’t know what’s left now, John,” she shakes her head, and hugs her chest all the tighter, except the cold’s on the inside, and it’s no damned use. 

“But I’m still here, still standing,” and she’s close to him, so close to him now, and he’s warm where she isn’t, and she wants to be warm. “So there must be _something_.”

There _must_ be.

“I don’t know what it’s worth,” she tells him, hovering at his back: “but it’s something, John.”

She leans. She reaches. She touches his shoulder.

He doesn’t flinch.

It’s a good sign.

“We can have something,” she whispers, and her voice doesn’t shake. “Wouldn’t something be better than nothing?”

He says nothing, which oddly, strangely, surely: somehow, she knows that means _something_.

“I do it, too,” she confesses, because she knows this, knows enough of him to read his mind; knows it’s been a year, today, and it’s raw all over again. “I think about him coming back.”

She draws a trembling breath, and squints her eyes tight against the growing burn.

“I think about them finding him in a,” she swallows hard. “A cave, somewhere. Battered.” She wills her fingers not to dig into John’s shoulder too harsh. “But breathing.”

“I think about what it might feel like,” and her eyes drift closed more calmly, more softly now, as she drifts in the reminiscences, the gaping wants. “I try to remember how it might feel for my chest not to be hollow and heavy all at once, all the time.”

“I dream about holding him again,” she murmurs. “I dream of him holding me. Touching me.” Her breath catches. “The scent of him. The taste.”

She comes back to herself, to the moment, when John’s hand covers her own.

“All the time, John.” And it’s true. “That doesn’t make me crazy.”

It doesn’t make either one of them crazy. Heartbroken, soul-sore, aching: yes. It makes them that.

But not crazy.

“And it doesn’t make me crazy to want _something_ ,” Mary pushes forward, resolute. “To grasp for something when it comes and hold it close, even though there is a part of me that’s still waiting for him to come home.”

She crouches to where he sits, slides the hands from his shoulders to wrap across his chest, to settle and hold him close.

“We could have warmth,” she breathes against his ear. “Comfort. Companionship.” 

She sighs out the breath still left in her lungs before she speaks.

“We could have love, John, I think.” And she does. She does think that.

“We could have so very much,” and she turns her head, rests it on his shoulder, soft in the crook of his neck as she looks out, looks far. “Because we are two people who understand each other’s mind.” She flattens her palm against him, and he takes it, laces her fingers in with his. “Each other’s heart.”

He breathes, and she breathes, and there is something there. There _is_.

“And we’ll never ask, nor think to ask,” she sighs, and her eyes close, and she falls into him a little; falls into the fact that he’s solid and warm; “for things that can’t be given.”

She turns into him, into his skin, his heat.

“We could have the other things, though,” she breathes against him, and he turns to her, looks at her, and he’s broken, and she’s broken, and maybe not wanting, not _needing_ to fix anything—not needing to fix broken pieces that stand like memorials, deep in the chest: maybe that’s what they offer. Maybe that’s what will work.

“Couldn’t that be enough?”

And he says nothing, not a thing. He stares, though, for a moment, before he leans in, before he presses his lips to hers and tastes of salt and regret and the first stirrings of a black-tinged hope, mournful and jagged but there.

And that is _something_.


	2. In Which Mary Adds Two Letters to Her Surname

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For [speakmefair](http://archiveofourown.org/users/speakmefair), who picked the prompt of the day from my "Who Might Mary Be?" grab-bag of nonsense. 
> 
> Again: Unbeta'ed. Un-Britpicked. Probably unrealistic. Just play along, yeah?

John wakes to damp air, dank walls. Breathing is difficult, settles like ice and knife points down his sternum, stretches his lungs too wide. He chokes on the inhale he grasps for, and the rebellion of his torso, peak to end, is agony; and while he’s been no stranger to the sensation of broken things lodged in his chest, of late, this is different.

This is different.

“Is he conscious?”

It’s a man’s voice: rough, low, and unknown to John. He keeps his eyes closed, fights to keep the shallow inhalations that threaten to cripple to a quiet hiss.

“Oh yes, he’s awake,” and that voice; the voice ruins it. “You can tell by the set of his shoulders,” and that touch, as she reaches and skim a hand along the curve of his arm; that touch ruins it. “He goes limp when he’s out cold.”

It ruins it, all of it, everything— leads even the battle-trained cells in John’s body to revolt, to twitch as he gasps, as pain erupts through his entire frame because that voice has whispered to him, that touch as mingled with his own between the sheets, that voice has cried his name and those hands have brought him comfort and pleasure in equal measures and no, no—

 _Mary_.

His eyes ease open, caked with something viscous that’s dried the lashes shut. He blinks, with considerable effort, and then he sees her.

Sees her smile, more twisted and hateful than its ever been before.

“Isn’t that right, John love?” she smirks, full-lipped and baring teeth as his burning eyes grow wide. She reaches for his jaw and cups it, tenderly, and his stomach threatens to upend him as he shivers against the touch, so different in so few moments as his heart starts to race.

“There he is,” she breathes out, almost approving, and he hates it, he _hates_ it, because he didn’t just think that he loved this woman—quiet, unassuming Mary—he didn’t just suppose she might suffice.

He’d given her his ring. He’d meant to make it _forever_.

“Oh now, don’t strain,” and John hadn’t really noticed he’d been doing anything of the sort until she levels a glare in his direction, and his bones scream in protest. “Last I counted we’d broken, hmm, four ribs?” She counts on her fingers, ponders, then nods. “You don’t want to aggravate them any further, really.”

“Mary,” John manages, and his voice is broken, hoarse, and he starts to feel it—the tension in his neck, the soreness in his throat from pressure on his trachea, from feeling as it rises in his chest: “What—”

“Oh, look sis,” the rough male voice crows, and John seeks out its owner: a tall man, brown hair like Mary’s, with eyes that gleam sinister in the low light, unlike Mary’s, unlike her warmth. “He’s still got eyes for you! Did he really think—”

And Mary laughs, cackles: high-pitched, and hateful, and when John looks to her, something cracks in him.

Unlike Mary’s eyes _used_ to be. 

“You underestimate me, Seb. As always,” she preens, but it’s a little deadened, bitter on the edges. “At least Jim never made that mistake,” and that’s when it starts to split at the seams, starts to come together and make twisted, aching, lethal sense.

“Mary,” John starts, because he doesn’t know what else, can’t _process_ this, and the air is so _thin_ —

“Oh John, do be quiet,” Mary chides, tiredly, and it sounds like He used to, sounds like that tone he’d use for all the “normal idiots,” telling Anderson to shut up and stopping lowering the street’s IQ; “And stay _still_ , really,” and John only realises just how impeded his movement is when she tightens the restraints on his arms, jerks them hard behind his back: only understands, then, just how trapped he is. “If you fidget around and puncture a lung that will make this so much less interesting.”

“Quicker, though,” the man—Seb—comments idly as he lights a cigarette and takes a smooth drag. 

“Patience,” Mary snaps. “It’s like you’re three years old again, Seb, honestly.”

“I’ve waited long enough,” he drawls, and something in Mary darkens in a way John didn’t think possible of the women he loved.

He’s beginning to wonder, however, if this person in front of him was ever that woman: sweet, caring, gentle Mary.

She seems very far away.

“ _We’ve_ waited long enough,” she hisses, and flicks a knife from her pocket, lets it catch on the lamplight: brutal.

“Save your breath, John,” she cuts off the words he didn’t consciously mean to start forming; doesn’t look at him: seems bored, and John remembers this. John remembers what it's like to be the opening act to the main event, the bait for the real prize, except he doesn’t understand, he cannot _understand_.

That ended on a bloody patch of pavement nearly two years ago.

“Your knight in shining armour will be here shortly, now that he knows we’ve got you,” she continues, and something icy sprints through John’s veins at the implication, and the look in her eyes. “Then the real fun begins. Speaking of,” she glances toward Seb. “Do we have eyes on Holmes?”

No matter the bruising to his windpipe, or the musty air, or the grinding of her broken ribs: no matter.

John cannot _breathe_.

“Landed at Heathrow twenty minutes ago,” Seb tells her, and John’s heart is racing, twisting, contorting in untenable ways as he tries to make sense of anything, _anything_. “En route. Big brother’s helping, of course.”

“The Iceman, yes,” Mary muses with a wicked grin. “Speaking of,” she turns her attention back to John—sharp, calculating, incomprehensibly _cruel_. “I’d always wanted to ask: Sherlock Holmes. Was ‘The Virgin’ an apt moniker?”

John feels numb, stare blankly. It’s too much, it’s too _much_ —

“No matter,” Mary shrugs, bored. “He certainly held you in high regard,” she grins at him conspiratorially, leans in, and John fights the urge to flinch as he tries, tries desperate to regroup, to regain some sense of balance, some ground upon which to stand. “Not that he ever thought his feelings could be returned by such a paragon of,” Mary’s face scrunches as she stares down her nose and spits: “ _Heteronormativity_.” 

John gasps out a breath: “What are you—”

“John, there’s no sense in beating around the bush. Not now.” She stands, flips the knife from her hand into the air, catches it. And again. “While I didn’t ask if you had any, oversight on my part, true, but these really _are_ your last words. It would be such a shame to waste them on lies.” She turns toward him, spins on her heel and pierces him with a menacing stare. “Hollow lies, at that.”

“Did you love him,” Mary asks suddenly; “ like he loves you?”

“I—” John starts, floundering, but he’s cut off by Seb’s condescending chuckle.

“The bastard jumped off a building to save this one’s life,” Seb screeches, incredulous; “while _he_ ,” and the man points at John, wild-eyed: insane; “shacks up with the first pair of tits to make doe eyes in his direction!”

And John’s about to find words, because Sherlock didn’t, Sherlock _couldn’t_ , but then he sees Mary, sees her twist and bend and deliver a devastating roundhouse to Seb’s left patella. 

The crunch that follows is sickening. The cry that gets muffled by Mary’s hand, and the knife she holds in it, churns in John’s gut.

“Christ, Mary—” Seb moans as soon as Mary releases the pressure she’s placing on his mouth.

“Make another fucking chauvinistic, snide remark at me, Sebastian,” she breathes like the Reaper; “and I’ll aim higher than your knee.”

John tries to reconcile the soft touch of his lover with the way she trails the tip of her blade against Seb’s jaw, drawing blood.

He can’t.

“He does have a point, though,” Mary says, straightening, brightening, refocuses on John. “Juvenile as his delivery will forever remain,” she tosses back toward Seb, disgusted. “But for a man who’s trekked the globe and spilled enough blood to spawn a river, all in the name of keeping that heart of yours intact,” she gestures idly to John’s chest, and John wishes that the pieces he’s slowly correctly fit together more obviously, that the gaps didn’t yawn quite so wide, so treacherous: “You certainly chose to grind his to a pulp.” 

John must look as blindsided as he feels, because she crows wildly in response, laughs high-pitched and shrill, nothing like his Mary.

Nothing.

“Are you wilfully ignorant, John?” she asks. “Or do you really have no clue?”

“Let him play coy,” Seb interjects. “He’ll see it soon enough,” and then a smile spreads across the the man’s lips, stretched around the short nub of his cigarette before he drops it, lets it smoke. “Those wide-eyes, all gutted,” Sebastian taunts as he stands, leers toward John. “Don’t you remember the pool?” he asks Mary, and if John felt ill before, it’s nothing, nothing compared to what floods him as he realises, what he sees and knows with sudden certainty as Mary’s face glazes with nostalgia, with murderous _want_.

“Mmm,” Mary hums, closes her eyes and breathes deep. “We should have killed you both, that night,” she sighs. “I regret that.” Her eyes blink open and she pins John again with them, lethal.

“Every day,” she whispers; “I have regretted that.”

“You’re lucky you got her,” Seb sneers. “I’d have killed you in your sleep, if I’d’ve been stuck playing house with your pathetic hide.” 

“That’s _why_ he got me,” Mary snaps back. “So that when it was over, when we made our move, when the organisation was weak enough so that we could swoop in among the ruins and build anew—”

She breathes in deep, composes herself.

“When the time was _right_ ,” she enunciates, carefully controlled. “We’d have Sherlock Holmes’ heart right where we wanted it.” And she stares John down again, pointed, and John thinks he understands: thinks he reads the impossible, the improbable—sees the truth in her gaze.

“Ready to break,” she exhales, delicate, wrathful: “Just before it burns.”

And John: John remembers the pool like a never-ending nightmare, remembers the way his heart had quivered, before it pounded, before it ached. He remembers the look in Sherlock’s eyes. Remember climbing the stairs after their unlikely escape and wanting, _wanting_ , before Sherlock walked away.

John remembers his heart then: nothing like it bludgeons, batters now.

“What do you think he’ll do, John?” Sebastian asks him, “when he sees that the man he loves so sickeningly shacked up with his arch nemesis? When he learns that for all the days he fought for you, you barely spared a toss for him?”

“You'd know,” John spits before he can think twice, think better; “being a tosser who's never poked a twat.” He sees the fire rise in Sebastian’s eyes before he can stop himself from saying another goddamned word, but the adrenaline’s pumping: it wants to get _out_.

“Not that you'd need to,” John adds, glancing at Mary—not his Mary, not _his Mary_ ; “your sister's enough of a blabbering cunt that you'd just need her mou—”

The strike across his face is brutal, cracks something; splits his skin on the diamond at the centre of the ring she wears.

His ring.

A lie.

“Hold your fucking tongue,” Mary hisses; “or I’ll rip it clean out.” She stares, full of hardened disdain, as he flicks his tongue meaningfully out to catch the blood that drips from the cut on his cheek. “Where’s Holmes?”

“Five minutes out,” Seb reads from his mobile, and Mary grins, then: shaky, but somehow still triumphant. She rises, and walks, and leaves.

“See Johnny boy,” Seb shoots back as he moves to follow; “there’s a reason Jim kept the Moran twins close,” and he smiles, and it’s sickening. “We always see the job done.”

John feels the bones shift in his chest as Sebastian reaches the door, steps through.

“ _Always_.”

The echo of the closing door is infinite.

John still cannot breathe.


	3. In Which Mary Navigates the Loving of Two Damned Beautiful Fools

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For [snogandagrope](http://archiveofourown.org/users/snogandagrope), who picked the prompt of the day from the digital grab-bag.

It’s telling, when she finds him in the spare room: the room that was John’s in the beginning, before her, but also after—after, until Sherlock returned.

Until they became...what they are.

Whatever they are, this thing that defies description, that transcends simple categories.

This thing that baffles and thrills her and makes her certain, where she’d only suspected before, that she’s absolutely mad.

“Knock knock,” Mary says as she raps on the wall and pushes the closed-over door when she hears no protest from within, and she suspects that what she’ll find will catch in her chest like a hook, like rusted hinge, but when she sees it: when she _sees_ it, it’s so much worse.

Sherlock Holmes, that larger-than-life monolith that was somehow still warm to the touch, still capable of crawling into bed behind her and grasping John’s hand atop her hip in the night; still capable of wrapping arms around her when she’s clever and making her feel wanted, feel fascinating even though she is the anomaly, the thing that keeps it all from being As It Was: the man who was somehow able to make her feel loved when she knows, _knows_ that despite his eschewance of sentiment, there is and always will be a single exception, a single chink in his armour. She knows where his heart lies, where his heart beats—can’t miss it, cannot possibly miss it for the way they look at each other: closer, in John’s case, to the way he looks at her but not exactly, not quite: they are something unto themselves.

Something she is apart from, in her way; and yet.

And yet she thinks, perhaps, there is something larger, something fuller and brighter that holds them all together, all their idiosyncrasies and the pieces of them made only for the loving of one another slipped in alongside all the other pieces that are made to love broader wholes. 

She thinks, perhaps, there is something more than comfort, here. Something more than settling for the reality they’ve been given in the dark, in a bed that holds the scent of them all, some nights; not many, but some, and it’s better those nights; that way 

She thinks, perhaps, there’s something significant in the way Sherlock looks at her, sometimes. In the way he considers her with a certain element of worth.

“You came after me—” she starts, but his eyes are wide, fever-bright as he turns to her with a speed uncanny, and they stop her in her tracks.

“Because you _matter_ ,” he snaps out, and the weight of it suffocates, liberates, and there is so much in his gaze for a moment, for a breath before it shutters, before it’s caged again, but Mary glimpsed it. 

She can hardly breathe.

“To John,” he adds awkwardly, staring at the duvet he’s seated upon. “You matter to John.”

There is so much unsaid in those words, those words that are truths and lies all at once: there is so much unsaid that it almost chokes her, almost eats her alive.

“Do you know what it’s like,” Mary finally asks, as the words fall into place of their own accord. “Falling in love with a heart that’s already full?”

He is quiet, barely acknowledges her words. She expected nothing less.

“He talked about you,” Mary tells him. “All the time.”

And it’s true: John never made a secret of Sherlock, not with her. John told her of all their adventures, and their misadventures. Told Mary of how Sherlock’s eyes changed colour, how his breath would pause and his face would slacken just before it overflowed with the rush of deductions come to fruition. And against even her own expectations, she’d been riveted. Ravenous. Desperate for more.

“It didn’t take long before you were filling me, too,” she confesses softly; “before I started falling for the memory, the idea of you.”

She’s a little bit breathless, in the now, with the genuine article sitting before her. 

“And then I met you, Sherlock,” and she smiles at that day, even though it hurts, because John had been so full of rage and heartbreak and a blinding kind of hope, and Sherlock had been full of relief and remorse, yet so resolute, and she had been taken in the upheaval: she’d grasped at solid ground only to have give way until she acclimated, until she learned how to navigate love inside a triad as opposed to a pair.

“And you’re a bit of a prick, really,” she giggles just a tad, good-natured, affectionate as he scoffs: derisive, self-deprecating.

“But the heart of you,” she presses on; “I think it gets underestimated far too often,” and she walks, crosses the distance and sits beside him, now, folds her hands in her lap to keep from touching before it’s time, before it’s anything but a threat, anything but a shot to scare him straight off. “Underestimated by _you_ , most of all.”

His eyes flicker to hers, then, and she suspects he doesn’t know how open they are, not at first, not until he looks away with all haste, all desperation not to be seen.

She aches for him, in more ways than one.

“You make me feel light, and warm,” and that is true, that is so very true: he does. From the first time he looked at her and swallowed what must have been a scathing remark as to her intelligence; from the first time he smiled at her and told her she was ‘not quite as moronic as the masses.’

From the first.

“You make me feel how John made me feel, when we met, as we got to know each other,” she swallows once, then twice. “As I fell in love with him.” 

And that, too, is very true. What she says, as well as what it implies.

“I know you love him,” she states plainly. “I know he loves you. I always knew that.”

It was how she knew John was worth it, to be honest. To see how he loved Sherlock gave her the measure of his soul.

“But Sherlock,” she says, and she hopes there’s enough compassion, enough courage, enough of the hum in heart that makes it into her words—she _hopes_.

“There’s no rule saying we all can’t love each _other_.” 

There isn’t. There is no rule.

Sherlock’s breath stumbles, and she’s so very near, just then; she wants so very much to know whether he feels any of it, whether he returns anything she’s offering, anything she will offer.

She doesn’t know. She can’t, not yet.

But it doesn’t stop her from leaping, as reckless and careless as Sherlock Holmes has ever been.

“And I do, you know,” she murmurs, bows she head as her heart pounds hard, and she thinks he knows it; thinks that he can tell: “I do.”

He is quiet, but something shifts. Something magnificent and maddening.

“You were brilliant today,” she breathes out, and she wants terribly to lean in just a little bit more, to stroke his cheek with infinite tenderness and watch him lean in to her, just the same.

He gasps out a bitter chuckle, shakes his head, and he’s warm: he’s so warm, and so close.

“John certainly thinks otherwise,” he exhales, and it’s filled with so much sadness, so much loss and fear, and she can’t have that. She won’t allow that.

“No,” Mary tells him, full of certainty and truth. “He doesn’t.”

She presses her flat palm heavy against the bed, just barely touching his knee until he deigns to look at her, to see her. 

“He was terrified,” Mary whispers, begs him with her eyes to _believe_ it. “Of losing you again.”

Sherlock blinks. She doesn’t understand what that means, yet, that particular blink: the length of it, the way those eyes flutter.

But she wants so badly to have the chance to learn.

“I would be, too,” she tells him, honest. “I’d have felt the very same. I _did_ , in fact.”

“You were in danger,” Sherlock protests, but it’s halfhearted at best. 

“I was inconvenienced,” Mary corrects, though at his look she adds: “Rather drastically,” because yes, that covers it. “But you could have _died_ Sherlock,” her breath catches in her throat as she recalls the perilous moments where the coin could have landed either way. “The stunt you pulled...”

“That _stunt_ —” Sherlock begins, indignant, but Mary shakes her head, speaks over him until he quiets.

“Don’t think I’m not grateful,” she insists. “I am. But just because I’ve never had to lose you doesn’t mean I didn’t see what it did to the people who love you,” and she dares; dares to reach out and take his hand in her own, and if she doesn’t watch his face for fear of rejection, of repulsion at her blatant touch in the lamplight rather than the dark, she’s all the more filled with helpless wonder when he grips her hand in kind, takes her fingers and threads his own between.

“Just because I’ve never known it doesn’t mean I want to learn.”

When his eyes meet hers, then, the world’s inside them. When his eyes meet hers, she knows, and she leans, and his face against her hands is so soft.

So soft.

“Can I?” she exhales, her gaze darting from his eyes, to his lips, to his eyes as she breathes, as her heart thrums because she realises that they’ve shared an innocent bed together, but she’s never kissed him, not once.

He doesn’t nod, exactly, but he sighs, and she learns something of him, reads something in him that tells her he wants.

He _wants_. And so she leans.

He tastes like spearmint and morning dew, and his hand upon her is ember-warm and tragic, gorgeous.

“You don’t,” he gasps, once they’ve parted, once he leans his brow to hers and gathers her palms against his chest as he breaths: “You don’t matter only to John.” 

And here, from him, like this: that’s a declaration if ever she’s heard one.

They stay there, like that, until sunrise creeps against the rooftops.

They stay.


	4. In Which Mary is Mildred, is Maeve, is May, is Melissa, is Margaret, is Mindy, is Melinda, is Monikah, is an Operative Under Mycroft Holmes

She brews her coffee that morning as Mildred, makes toast and pecks at it fitfully as she stares woefully at the state of her kitchen countertop.

She clips an identification badge to her lapel that names her to be Maeve; she straightens her suit and locks up behind herself.

She enters the compound and trades her papers and ID in for new, as per protocol: she’s May, now, and that’s always hard, when consecutive names are similar. She trained for this, of course, but the reality is disconcerting, still.

She sorts through cases in the file room, prepares paperwork for digitisation for three hours in complete isolation, which she uses to her full advantage by loudly humming various orchestral scores from Hans Zimmer.

She swipes out, and her credentials shift automatically to list her name as Melissa. 

She’s on mail duty—the glamorous life of a Junior Operative—and she is mostly ignored as she delivers various confidential communiques and a handful of questionable magazine subscriptions, but when she _is_ acknowledged, she’s Margaret, and she knows better than to argue the point.

By the time she’s processing field op reports over the lunch she takes at her desk, all of her intraoffice memos are addressed to Mindy. She rolls her eyes, bites her sandwich—egg salad, and not very good, to be honest—and kicks off her flats to sit on her legs as she spins half right, half left in her chair with each paragraph she reviews.

Her supervisor stops by to collect her progress some hours later, and says, “Thank you, Melinda.”

Melinda’s a nice enough name.

By the time the day draws to a close, she hears the telltale slip of an envelope onto the far corner of her desk: someone lower in the hierarchy than even she, dropping off her exit credentials for the day. She spares a look to the name that accompanies her face this hour:

 _Monikah._ She frowns.

She doesn’t look at all like a Monikah.

She treats herself to a bite of the chocolate bar she keeps in her desk, to fend off any identity confusion that might ensue.

And then she gets the call to report to the Home Office.

Mycroft Holmes has requested her presence.

Mycroft _Holmes_ wants to see _her_.

Monikah can barely swallow, let alone draw anything meaningfully resembling breath.

She collects her things, though, as calmly as she can, and stares longingly at the remainder of the chocolate bar.

She clicks her tongue a bit, tests the function of her throat.

Grabs the chocolate and chews it greedily, desperately, and swallows.

And it’s a struggle, the swallowing around her nerves, but Monikah? 

Monikah damn well _manages_.

______________________________

In the back of the black sedan, after the encounter with Himself, she runs through the essential highlights of her mission once, twice, again and again:

— Classification: Top Secret.

— Consulting Detective, Holmes; status: active.

— Consulting Blogger, Watson; status: active.

— Consulting Detective, Holmes; status: infatuated with Consulting Blogger; fabricated own demise to ensure Consulting Blogger’s safety. 

— Mutuality of affections; status: undetermined.

— Consulting Blogger, Watson; status: grieving; incapacitated.

— Consulting Blogger, Watson is a liability.

— Consulting Blogger, Watson cannot, at this juncture, be called upon to maintain his own safety. 

— Consulting Detective, Holmes cannot, at this juncture, be expected to successfully recover from the demise of Consulting Blogger.

— Consulting Detective, Holmes cannot, at any juncture, be expected to successfully recover from the demise of Consulting Blogger.

— Consulting Blogger, Watson; status: target.

— Pursuing parties; status: unknown.

— Procedure: nullify current target status of Consulting Blogger, Watson.

— Procedure: orchestrate events by which pursuing parties determine Consulting Blogger, Watson to no longer pose a threat and/or represent an exploitable weakness for Consulting Detective, Holmes.

She checks her makeup as the vehicle rolls to a stop outside the cafe that her mark frequents; sighs heavily and twists her hair into a clip as she steps out, steadies on modest her heels.  

— Initiate: romantic liaison.

She enters the establishment, identifies her mark immediately: the world is a dreary, desolate place, but it’s still rare to see that kind of heartbreak in the flesh.

She lingers, studying the menu until he stands—slowly, as if it’s painful, as if his joints protest—and makes his way forward.

She tugs at her blouse, undoes the top two buttons.

— Note: Watson’s sexual attractions and proclivities align with the Agent’s physical profile.

She goes to order an espresso before she bites it back, tracks him in her peripheral vision as he sips at his half-full drink and makes toward the door.

— Note: Watson’s social preference and personality traits do not align with the Agent’s psychological profile.

She orders a vanilla latte, and times her movement just so, _just so_.

— Note: Improvisational realignment is necessary; constant vigilance and subsequent reassessment is required.

Their collision is spectacular. She fights every instinct in her not to beam at the precision of it, the beauty.

“Goodness!” she exclaims, flutters her hands as she ups her vocal register a full octave, because it’s an act: it’s an act and she needs to be anything but herself. “I am so sorry, I didn’t even see you! Let me help,” she insists, as she awkwardly attempts to swat the spilled coffee from his jumper.

“Can I buy you a replacement?” she schools her features into hopeful dismay as she gestures at his coffee, now empty and without its pop-on lid.

He says nothing, at first. She bats her eyes, and hopes, _hopes_ she’s playing her cards right, because she has one goal here.

One.

— Objective: protect Consulting Blogger, Watson at all costs.

“How about I buy _you_ a coffee, as an apology for getting in your way,” the mark replies with a half-smile before he gestures at the hem of her skirt; “And for soaking your lovely outfit.”

Mary giggles: it’s so trite, it’s almost cute.

She nods, and takes the hand he holds out to her.

“John,” he introduces himself, and in return, she gives him the name Sir provided.

“Mary,” she tells him with a smile. “Mary Morstan.”


	5. In Which Mary Has Six Months, At Most

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for non-specific mentions of terminal illness in this chapter.

He meets her by accident, leaving his shift at the clinic.

She’s wrapped in wool; he appreciates that. Her eyes have a colour about them that reminds him of—well.

A sense of depth that fills him with heartbreak and yearning.

He asks her out for coffee. Her heels click as she leads the way.

Six months, they give her; six months at most. He’s never quite moved past the pang of regret when he sees a grim prognosis; doesn’t manage it here and now. 

“Predictable,” Mary scoffs with a wry sort of smirk, and a glimmer in her eye he can’t quite place. “They’ve been giving me six months for the past three years. You lot are a bit like weathermen, then? Just guessing?”

She grins at him, and he can’t even bring himself to feel sad, to feel the familiar ache when he sees this—the unfairness, the arbitrariness of life on Earth: he can’t help but smiling back, because her grin is just that perfect. That blinding. 

Most of her days are good days, she says. She doesn’t know how, or why. She puzzles her doctors—tells John, conspiratorial-like, that she’s always been a bit beyond the mean.

He doesn’t doubt it.

They’re not dating, exactly; but they’re not _not_ -dating, either. John’s not sure what it is, really. He thinks it’s her zest for life. Her utter disregard for the rules, her unconcern for the norm. Her vibrancy. The momentum that surrounds her like a whirlwind and tugs at his edges, the loose bits of him he never figured out how to stitch up or tuck in after—

After.

It’s on their sixth not-date—coffee, again, though she never lets them go to the same cafe, never lets them get too comfortable, too stagnant—that Mary mentions The List.

“I don’t like calling it a Bucket List,” she says, sipping something very frothy and full of syrups. “Besides, it’s more silly things, really. Just, you know. Daydreams. Things you see or think of on a whim and say ‘Oh, yes. That. That’d be nice.’”

He reaches across the table and wipes foam from her upper lip. She giggles, and nips his finger as he retreats, playful.

The end of this—whatever this is: the end is inevitable. 

He doesn’t know if he can take another loss.

He looks at her, as she smoothes her hair behind her ear.

“What sorts of things?” he asks.

He doesn’t know if he can walk away from this, from her.

From the sensation of _being_ , and _feeling_ in the numb places, the hollows and the cracks.

She takes another drink and smiles around the curve of the mug.

She’s got foam on her lip again as she tells him:

“No particular order, mind. But I’ve always wanted to...”

_____________________________

 

For the most part, she wasn’t lying. They’re silly little things.

She wants to buy a book from every used book shop she passes, one with a personal note in the cover, so she can imagine the writer, imagine the recipient. They come across a well-worn _A-Z London_ guide, scrawled with: 

_26 adventures, love, at the very least. —S_

and John has to feign a headache before he crumbles.

She wants to climb a tree in a dress, the airy sort her mother never let her play in as a child; John follows, against his better judgement—gets a bit stuck, and though she laughs at him, she helps him down with good humour.

She wants to watch the stars from a rooftop, and that’s when she finally asks him, because it’s hard: it’s hard to see the sky like that and think about how boring the solar system isn’t.

That’s when she finally asks him about the one who stole his heart.

So he tells her. He tells her because he can’t help himself; because there are better reasons to speak it than to not. 

He waits for her to pity him. To tell him it’s time to move on. To say something polite but generic: _He sounds wonderful_ , or _I’m sure you were never bored_ , or _I’m so sorry for your loss_.

In truth, though, he should know to expect more from her, by now.

“He was a genius, obviously,” and the way she says it— _obviously_ —is so very Sherlock that is catches in his chest. “He sent you away to keep you safe.”

“He sent me away to keep me _out_ of the way.” And that, well: that still stings.

“You don’t honestly believe that, do you?” Mary asks, incredulous. “No, he loved you.”

John stares at her, while she stares at the sky. She says it like it’s common knowledge, or a law of physics. A fact of life.

Of death.

“He was a _genius_ , John, if what you’ve told me is true. Don’t tell me you’ve never thought he might still be out there. Don’t tell me there’s no way he had a plan.”

John blinks. Mary’s eyes trace constellations in the dark.

“I saw his body,” John says, voice choked. “He didn’t have a pulse.”

“Doctors,” she sniffs, but not unkindly. “You’re just guessing.”

John swallows hard. “Like weathermen.”

She grins, arms propped behind her, face tilted full to the sky: “Exactly.”

_____________________________

She wants to climb a mountain. John takes her to Gwynedd, and they’re both winded halfway up, but the view’s more than worth it.

The kiss she gives him, just on the cheek as she hugs him, joyful: that’s worth it, too.

She wants to drive through London blowing bubbles to pedestrians. John borrows a motorbike that Mike never sold, and she laughs the whole time, holding a wand in one hand and John’s waist in the other.

John laughs, too.

She asks about Sherlock. Quite a lot.

“What was his favourite colour?”

John says he doesn’t know.

“Seems like he was right. You see,” she glances at him from where she lies stretched on the sofa. His spot. Where he’d sprawl. "But you don't observe."

“Aubergine,” John answers her, and finishes brewing their tea.

“What did he dream of being, when he grew up?”

“Pirate.” She smiles at that. It’s a less-good day, and she’s tired. She takes half-a-sip of the tea before she sets it down and sighs.

“What was his greatest fear?”

John’s quiet at that, as he thinks on it. There were times when he thought Sherlock was fearless. But he remembers Baskerville. He remembers the pool. He remembers Sherlock’s voice on the phone at the last, and John _knows_ what a lie sounded like in that voice, from those lips.

Knows the truth, just as surely.

“Loss,” John answers. In all ways. In all forms.

“When did you know that you loved him with everything?” Mary asks him, very soft.

By now, with her, he doesn’t have to pause. “Knew I loved him? When I killed a man to keep him safe.”

She blinks at the yellow smile on the wall behind her.

“Loved him with everything? When I sat in that chair,” he nods to the chair that was his, that sits empty now, most times, because he sits in Sherlock’s chair more often than not. Tries to feel his presence in the shape of it, the scent; “When I sat in that chair without him, and stared at the blood, his blood, just a speck on my fingernail,” and he picks at it, the place where it was: a nervous tick now, all the time.

“When I sat there and stared at his blood and felt dizzy, and breathless, and empty.”

Mary looks at him. He looks at Mary. 

“I knew that I loved him with everything when that feeling wouldn’t fade.”

“Do you think you’ll ever stop?” she asks, after a silence. “Loving him?”

She’s watching him, still, and he shakes his head.

She smiles, breathes deep, and closes her eyes. 

“Good,” she whispers.

“I wish you could have met him,” John tells her.

“Maybe one day, I will,” she breathes on an exhale, still smiling.

And with Mary, it doesn’t feel foolish, or crazy, or like his mind’s tearing itself into shreds.

With Mary, it’s so very easy to _hope_.

_____________________________

It’s been seven months, or nearly that. Mary stays at 221 more often than she doesn’t. Sometimes she sleeps on the sofa. Sometimes she sleeps in John’s bed by herself. Sometimes they share.

Sometimes, John curls in Sherlock’s room, and she finds him.

Sometimes, they curl there together. 

She has good days, still.

But there are the same amount of those as there are of the less-good days, now.

They have sex once. Just once. Afterward, they’re both in tears. Afterward, he can’t say what causes it, what comes over them: who starts trembling first.

But she holds him. She holds him, and her sorrow falls warm on John’s shoulder as her thin frame presses up against him: too thin, too small.

“He knew, John,” she whispers, apropos of nothing; “I know that he knew.”

John shivers against her, and she kisses his head, wraps her limbs around him and draws him tight to her chest.

“And I promise you,” she breathes against his temple, mouths into his skin; “I promise you, that whether he’s living and I meet him when he comes back, or he’s gone, and there’s an after, and I find him once I’m there,” and John swallows the sob that rises at that, at all of it: swallows it down, but only just.

“I swear to you, John, I will tell him he was treasured. I will take care of him, and show him the love he deserves until you get the chance.”

John’s shaking, and his eyes burn, stream relentless.

“You’ll see him again, John,” she tells him, soothes him. “If I believe anything, I believe that you’ll see him again.”

“I hope so,” John gasps, wet and breathy, and _god_.

 _God_ , but he hopes so.


	6. In Which Mary is Nineteen and Will Never, Ever, Ever Do Ecstasy Ever Again

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for recreational drug use and inaccurate/exaggerated portrayals of said drug use and its effects. And borderline-crack, because I have no idea what this chapter is.

Mary has no idea if he recognises her: on the one hand, from all of John’s stories, from all of John’s stories of their adventures, all of the hero-worship and frustration, she’d guess the man’s brain was near-infinite in its capacity, and yet then there’d been the tales of the solar system, and mere ‘transport’, and ‘married to the work’, and she thinks: there’s no way.

There’s absolutely no way that he remembers her.

In honestly, she remembers very little about _him_ ; it was the eyes, really.

The eyes are what bring it all back.

And suddenly, she’s nineteen again. John’s flat, which has started to feel like home these past months, or at least a place that could be, one day—could be a home—feels suddenly foreign, feels isolating and cold against her skin and she shivers, more for reasons on the inside than out.

John looks at her with a touch of concern, and stands to make tea.

Sherlock stares at her, hands folding in front of his lips, and she’s nineteen years old again.

But in her own mind, so is he.

______________________________

_He’s nineteen, and he’s sprawled on a chair, long legs propped out far and his arms dangling off either side, his body boneless as he lets smoke stream indecently from the purse of his mouth. His curls are wild, and his cheekbones are all the more prominent for the flush, for the upturn of his lips around the joint, and she hates her friends, a bit: the ones who brought her here._

_Stupid friends._

_The party—is it a party?—is in full-swing when they arrive, the ether of smoke and alcohol, sex and something stronger thick in the air already. She’s got a her first beer in hand when Maggie takes a hit on the bong; Mary shakes her head, and they jeer but leave her be. She doesn’t like the look of it: she’s not a prude, exactly, and she _did_ allow them all to convince her to come at all because she’s strung out, she wants to relax, unwind, whatever means necessary and what not, but, just—_

_That’s what she sees him: sprawled decadent, sloppy and still composed, all ebony and ivory, and there’s a heat in her, unexpected, that rises—he’s a fucking piano, and she wants very much to play._

_She walks up to him, and the way he watches her makes her knees feel quaky._

_Stupid knees._

_“You’re not pregnant,” he tells her softly, casually: a little bit dazed. “You’re three days late, so you’ve been concerned, but the condom didn’t break, and Maxwell’s tragically impotent, anyway.”_

_She blinks at him, owlish._

_“It was a good call to break it off with him, though,” the boy drawls out, his head lolling, lazy as he grins: “You’re not brilliant by any stretch, but you could do better than that amœbic twat.”_

_She can’t even bring herself to be offended, she’s so stuck on the fact that he knows her, knows _about_ her, knows about the arsehole physicist she let charm her into bed—_

_“Don’t,” he cuts into her thoughts; “don’t call him a physicist. Demeans the entire profession.”_

_She giggles, just a bit, and he smirks as he studies her: she can feel the way he dissects her, fishes through the melee of her being in the gaping darkness of those blown pupils._

_She’s right up on him, kneecap to kneecap, and when she reaches for the joint held in his unnaturally long fingers, her hands shake just a tad._

_Stupid hands._

_They don’t shake as she stands there, toking as he watches, half-entranced._

_Not-stupid hands._

_He watches her, and she watches him as she breathes out, slow and long, and she can feel the buzz of it starting, spreading, and while it’s nice, rather nice, it’s not the vibratory thrill that’s shaking in his technicolor irises._

_It’s not just marijuana that’s got him soaring._

_He’s holding out a hand, all of a sudden: it might be seconds, or minutes later, but it takes her a long stretch of moments to realise there’s something in the centre of his palm, an offering._

_The tablet looks bright, even in the dim light, but it’s got nothing on the shine of his gaze._

_And it’s hormones, that’s all, just chemistry and nonsense._

_Stupid hormones._

_She takes the tab, and when his arm doesn’t withdraw, she takes that, too._

_He tastes like malt and mint and ten kinds of ash. His tongue’s shockingly limber. His teeth are impossibly smooth._

_She dips her head to suck at the length of his neck, the jut of his collarbone, and he arcs to her, keens._

_“That’s nice.” She can feel the words in his throat, and yes, it’s nice._

_“You smell good,” she feels herself forming the words into the crook of his neck, inane and embarrassing beneath the flush of the high: impregnable._

_“Mmmm,” he murmurs as she moves down, as the riot in her head starts to crescendo achingly, spectacularly while she straddles him, plants her feet on the floor and moves lower, lower._

_“When you eliminate the impossible,” he whispers, one hand in her hair as she eases the zip of his jeans down, parts the denim and tugs it away; “Whatever remains, however improbable, must be true.”_

_“What’s this?” she asks, because the world’s spinning and blinking, and his eyes are like lasers in the cavernous void._

_“Oh,” he sighs, and her fingers trace the elastic waistband at his hips, the last barrier left. “Nothing,” he breathes, and she leans in, takes the fabric between her teeth and eases it, not far, not much, but reveals the first hint of hair there, as coiled and dark as the mop on his head._

_“S’good though, isn’t it?” he asks, though not to her, not to anyone, really: to the universe—impossibly improbable. “It sounds good. Flows.”_

_The vowel gets caught on his tongue and lingers, lilts, and she giggles, and he giggles, and his cock twitches at the point of her chin._

_Her heart feels like it’s pounding, but that might be a boldfaced lie._

_Stupid heart._

_“I’ll need more, soon,” he pulls her hair at the roots, not hard, but she pauses, tries to process what he says, what he means._

_“Hmm?” she hums, confused but unbothered, her nose lined against the length of him, straining through his pants._

_“It’s getting blurry,” he slurs a bit. “Blurry’s not,” and she mouths the tip of his cock through the fabric so he’ll falter, just a tad: “It’s not…”_

_“Sharp,” he finally manages. “I take it to be sharp,” he continues, starts to babble when she slips her fingers flow to cup the tightening flesh of his balls. “To be better. To _see_ , so the observations can grow—”_

_“Are you telling me to stop?” she whispers against the damp line of the pants that she wants to move aside, that she wants to push away because she thinks, she knows, that there will be kaleidoscopes and rainbow prismatics if she does, when she does._

_He stares at her._

_His eyes are so _bright_._

_“However improbable,” he says, and the words are sluggish, but gorgeously pronounced._

_He stares at her._

_She thinks that means he wants._

_~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~_

_The next thing she remembers is the morning after. The next thing she remembers is vomiting for an hour, until her throat felt raw, until the world was spinning and blinking and she wanted to die, quite ardently, and when the room around her finally stilled she promised herself:_

_Never a-fucking-gain._

______________________________

Those eyes, in truth, are still quite bright.

John’s taking far too long with the tea.

Right, so. 

Right.

She opens her mouth to say things she shouldn’t—she never grew out of that; to say _I never took anything again after that_ , or _I don’t remember what I did that night but if I can’t remember it was probably wretched and embarrassing so thanks for not humiliating me and telling everyone I was horrible_ , or even _I’m a respectable human being, and I’m good for John, and I know that he had feelings for you, has feelings, whatever they are and maybe you reciprocate them or maybe you don’t but I love him, I do, and I_—

“John,” Sherlock greets her boyfriend, the maybe-love-of-her-life, as John sets one cup, two cups down and sips at the third: “Your beloved Miss Morstan’s been keeping secrets from you.”

The world stands horribly still, in that moment. Mary’s hands feel clammy, her breath feels short, and those eyes are neon-brilliant as they pierce her, as her heart starts to race for all sorts of reasons she has no desire to untangle.

Stupid reasons. Stupid heart.

John’s eyes, though: they widen a bit, flicker toward her before he frowns, before his gaze narrows.

“Listen, Sherlock, I don’t—”

“The main thing being the extraordinary talent she possesses regarding the use of her tongue.”

Sherlock lets the statement linger as Mary gasps and flushes, as John gapes open-mouthed like a sea creature, as Sherlock himself sips idly at his tea.

“Of course it’s obvious that for all of your sexual escapades, you’ve not yet pulled that trick out of your bag. My thighs were sore for days, you know,” Sherlock smiles at her wickedly. “One doesn’t tend to forget a night like that.”

Mary thinks she might die, then and there.

“As a matter of fact, I’d often thought about trying it out on John, before I had to,” Sherlock swallows then; “Before I had to leave,” and it’s the pause that draws Mary’s attention to the tension in his jaw, the fervor in the way his eyes move, the white stains at the lines of his knuckles: the light blush on those immaculate cheeks.

Nervous.

He’s nervous.

There’s an open palm here, and there’s not tablet in the centre, but she notices it quicker, this time; hesitates where she didn’t before: looks to John, who is staring at Sherlock, who is fighting something fierce inside his throat before he speaks again: 

“I never did, of course,” he admits, breaks eye contact. “I was never sure I could replicate the results.”

His gaze flits to Mary for an instant, just an instant, and John’s still gaping, but Mary, well.

Mary is suddenly filled with the strangest of desires, and she doesn’t remember the whole of that night, not its highlights—she doesn’t recall how Sherlock Holmes tastes.

She finds that she’d like a reminder.

“Right,” John exhales, and Mary’s not the only one who notices the heat in the gaze that’s caught before her, Sherlock’s eyes wide and John’s bleeding feeling, yearning, arousal so strong that it sends wanting straight through her veins. 

Mary’s not the only one who notices the swell at John’s groin, steadily revealing itself.

She’s not the only one who notices the matching bulge at Sherlock’s crotch where he sits, lips parted, eyes damned near black.

“Right,” John repeats, breathless now. “Bedroom?”

Three sets of footsteps prove only too happy to oblige.


	7. In Which Mary is Quite Clever, Indeed

In truth, they both should have known better. They’re smarter than this. They let themselves get distracted, get caught up in the chase and the rush, so that when the explosion hit, they could only run forward, they could only seek refuge in one place: one place, and with not a second left to spare, because whatever’s holding them inside, whatever’s barricading their escape: they heard it fall, just as they’d closed the door behind them to shield the wash of flame.

John thinks he’d give just about anything for a little bit of fire, just about now.

“I love you,” John says, and his voice sound muffled and dim against the metal walls, and fuck, _fuck_ , of all the places, of all the times they might have met their end: a freezer.

A fucking meat freezer at the back of a butchery. 

At least they’re together, he figures. And least Mary’s not here, at least they all won’t face the Reaper.

“You should know,” John starts again, and his breath is a visceral cloud as he shivers inside the arms that hold him, Sherlock’s arms: burrows instinctively into that embrace, into the warmth of the coat around those shoulders, the warmth of that body: “You should know that I’ve loved you since…”

John trails off, and he realises, suddenly, just how stiff, how frigid, how tinged with blue Sherlock’s hands are where they hold John’s close to his chest. John sucks in too much icy air on the inhale and fights a wracking cough when it hits his lungs: takes Sherlock’s hands in his own and rubs at them fiercely, ignoring the burn in his own frostbitten digits. 

“Fuck,” John hisses, and Sherlock flips his hands to grasp at John’s, manoeuvres him down and around so that they’re face to face, chest to chest. 

“We need to keep your vital organs warm,” Sherlock chides him, holds him close, and the soft curve of those lips to John’s brow should be a comfort as he whispers there, kisses the skin: “Some doctor you are.”

It should be, but it’s not—Sherlock’s chest against his own is warm, but not warm enough, the heart beneath him racing, unmoored, the body pressed against his own steeling for the inevitable, and John cannot be comforted, John cannot let this stand.

“And what about you?” he protests, grabs for the hands that Sherlock’s neglecting again, wrapped around John’s shoulders.

“Irrelevant,” Sherlock says, tone blank, but John won’t have it.

“Don’t you fucking—”

“John,” Sherlock cuts him off, and when John meets his eyes, those impossible eyes, they’re a bit glazed, a bit like flickering lights that might spring back to shining, might flutter and fade, and it drags something sinister, something colder than their fingers and their bodies and their blood; draws it up close to John’s heart and strokes the muscle, twists it so that it aches: “John, for everything we’ve seen and done, and survived,did you ever truly believe that I’d let you die first?”

John feels the tightening of his throat, the constricting of his lungs where he can’t afford to lose the breath; the stinging of his eyes where the tears will freeze if they fall.

“You can’t,” John chokes, but Sherlock leans to touch his lips to John’s mouth, to swallow the words, and the lips are warm, at least.

“Shh,” Sherlock breathes against him. “We’ll be fine.”

“Sherlock, no one knows for sure where we are,” John scoffs, because hopelessness is heavy in his stomach, in his chest. “The air’s already getting thin, it’s fucking freezing, and given the fact that we can’t get the bloody _door_ opened,” John trails, shakes his head into Sherlock’s chest, and tries to breathe steadily through the frustration, the first hints of heartbreak; because the air _is_ growing scarce, that’s true.

They don’t have much time.

“It’s not time to resign ourselves,” Sherlock tells him, tone firm, voice low. “Not yet.”

“Sherlock—”

“Not _yet_ ,” he insists, and John quiets, focuses on the rabbit hum of the heartbeat beneath him and tries to imagine more time for them both.

“Mary,” he says softly into the silence that descends against the hum of the refrigeration unit that surrounds.

“She is provided for,” Sherlock breathes against his ear, and even the exhale feels too cool; sends an ominous shiver right down John’s spine.

“Mycroft,” John speculates, and John’s suddenly very grateful for Sherlock’s dick of a brother; if Mary’s under his watch, she’ll be safe, if nothing else.

“Provisions. In my will,” Sherlock elaborates, but only just. “For you both.”

“Sherlock,” John starts, because he didn’t know. Well, he knew, of course he _knew_ , knew Sherlock cared deeply for the both of them, but this speaks to something… _something_.

“Sentiment,” Sherlock murmurs, half disgusted, half shy. 

“It’s just the two of us,” John argues, soft. “No sense in beating around that bush now, is there?”

“I told you,” Sherlock huffs, “it’s not yet time—”

“Yes, yes, I know,” John concedes, though just a bit helplessly. “But just in case,” he pushes on; “That’s all I’m saying. Just in case.”

They’re quiet for a long while. Minutes. Perhaps longer. They barely breathe—they’re both desperate for time.

Sherlock’s pulse starts to slow, and like this, here and now, that’s not a good sign.

“They did burn the heart out of me,” Sherlock murmurs, the sound barely there, depending on the sheer depth of feeling to propel it, make it heard: “In a sense.”

“They made it into something that could extend beyond myself,” Sherlock explains, and John feels a tingling sensation, something that would be warmth if they were elsewhere, held in another place

“Made it into something that could latch and hold fiercely to another,” and Sherlock meets John’s eyes, then, and oh: oh, but that’s warmth.

Impossible warmth, and it won’t save them, but it’s alright.

It’s alright, because the thing in those eyes is incredible, is infinite, and it’s for John.

It’s directed toward John.

“I still do not understand,” Sherlock breathes out just before he buries his head in John’s neck. “I still lie awake in the night, in the centre of our bed, between you both,” and John feels his control crumbling and Sherlock hugs him tight, as they both retreat in their minds to the bed they share with the woman they love. 

“I still wonder at the mechanisms, the esoteric turns of being that brought you both to me,” he shakes his head, and John feels the brush of his curls, the wet circle of his open mouth against the skin; “that brought me to you in kind.”

“I scoffed at love until I seared with it,” Sherlock tells him, confesses shrill. “You gave me new life, John. You, and Mary, and the ways that you—”

The banging, the ruckus from beyond the mental door that’s sealed their fate: it ricochets like gunfire and the haggard pump of adrenaline in the vein: they both still, try their best to listen as their eyes meet, anxious, not yet hopeful.

Not yet.

“Another bomb?” John asks through clenched teeth, but that’s all he manages before the chamber around them starts to shake and the noise grows deafening, and John feels Sherlock start to turn their bodies, start to place himself in the line of fire and no, no, that’s not this goes down:

“Oh, no you don’t—” John tells him, fierce with it, as he throws his weight against Sherlock’s frame and presses them both to the ground just as the furor peaks and the wall caves in, he squeezes his eyes closed, waits for oblivion to fall and keeps his attention, his focus, the whole of his being fixed upon Sherlock beneath, Sherlock around him, Sherlock, Sherlock—

Oh god, oh god— 

“Oh, thank _god_!”

He opens his eyes, sees Sherlock’s gaze fixed upon him, eyes wide and lips—tinged blue—starting to curl upward just a tad.

That’s not the voice he’d been expecting.

John barely manages to flip over before his face is taken between painfully warm hands, his left cheek rubbed to heat it while the second hand reaches for Sherlock and pulls him close. And John finds himself shivering all the harder, all of a sudden, as he breathes out, shaky next to Sherlock where they’re held in the arms of their third piece, the one that makes them whole—the other half of both their hearts:

“ _Mary_.”

_________________________________

 

Their hospital beds are next to each other—routine, now—as they suffer rather tedious active core rewarming from the lines in their arms. Mary’s perched at the foot of Sherlock’s bed—he came out the worse of the two of them, the self-sacrificing git—but he’s managing just fine, watching Mary with a gleam in his eyes and a genuine smile on his lips.

“ _Brilliant_ woman,” he praises her, and she grins wide.

“You didn’t doubt me, did you?” 

“Not for an instant,” Sherlock assures her, and John suddenly thinks: _It’s not time to resign ourselves; not yet_.

Mary giggles, a bit too pitchy: “Well, that makes one of us.” She reaches for Sherlock’s hand and squeezes; he allows it.

“I made him promise to let me know where you two go off to,” Mary tells John, and the full weight of her affection for both the men in her life is heavy in her gaze. “I worry, after all.”

The comment is pointed. Very pointed, indeed.

“She’s very persuasive,” Sherlock heads off John’s inevitable question of what, exactly, had convinced _Sherlock Holmes_ of all people to willingly submit to someone keeping tabs on him.

“Very intimidating, you mean,” Mary snorts. “The one who does the housekeeping holds the keys to the kingdom, my loves. I told him he could kiss every experiment goodbye as soon as he left it unattended, if he let me spend another night a nervous wreck over whether you two’d gotten kidnapped, or drowned, or dismembered.” 

“Didn’t you say it was too risky, telling her where we were?” John asks, because they’d had the conversation, before; they’ve had it more than once, in the after, in the now; “In case someone was watching us, in case someone wanted to follow?”

Mary eyes Sherlock devilishly. “We compromised.”

“I leave her clues,” Sherlock explains with a smug little smirk. “The degree to which she is able to circumvent her anxiety as to our welfare hinges crucially upon her powers of deduction.”

John turns his gaze to Mary, urging elaboration with his eyes; she obliges. 

“The explosion, of course, was a dead giveaway,” she clicks her tongue in disapproval. “You two trail trouble behind you like a wet fucking blanket.”

Which is true, and he’d admit it, even if Mary _wasn’t_ eyeing them with just a hint of sharp accusation.

“Char,” Sherlock prompts her, just a hint of pride in his tone.

“You left burnt toast on the table,” Mary responds. “A table which was otherwise _clean_ ,” she grins cheekily. “Suspicious enough.”

Sherlock nods, pleased. “Cute,” and it’s not a response—not from _Sherlock_ : another prompt.

“My laptop background,” Mary replies. “The cats _are_ cute, Sherlock, I don’t care what you say.”

That prompts a snort from both her partners: derisive from Sherlock, amused from John: that argument had been absolutely hilarious to witness.

Mary, though: Mary’s grin’s only growing. “Did you like my new password?” she asks, all faux-innocence.

Sherlock, all that he’s still warming up, visibly flushes.

John doesn’t bother suppressing his laughter.

“Irie,” Sherlock prompts again, ignoring them both imperiously, but they know him too well: they aren’t fooled.

“Reggae internet radio, honestly?” Mary asks, a touch incredulous. “You’re lucky I check my computer when I get home every day.”

Sherlock smirks at her, but it’s affectionate. “I’m lucky you’re gorgeously _predictable_.”

“I’m lucky _you’re_ the one who’s changing my default home page back to Google,” Mary shoots back. “I couldn’t get my browser to navigate away from that damned radio site for anything.”

Sherlock nods, though whether he’s asking her to continue piecing together her hints or agreeing to return her laptop to its previous state: that’s anyone’s guess.

“Char-cute-irie. Charcuterie,” Mary reveals, and it’s hard to overlook the delight on her face. “Which is too damn posh a term for just deli meats, darling, I’ll stand by that until the day I die,” and that, John recalls, was yet another fantastic argument he’d been privileged enough to watch, particularly considering it’d featured a slice of ham flung at Sherlock’s face amidst Mary’s overwhelming laughter. “You’ve got to have at _least_ a pâté on the plate before it merits.”

Sherlock’s staring at her with thinly-veiled impatience, grimacing at John’s quiet giggles because he knows, obviously, exactly what’s going through John’s mind. 

“Right,” Mary regroups. “Meats. Meat locker.” She nods, decisive. “Rang both of you, no answer. Texted, no response. So I called Greg, asked if there’d been any trouble near any butcher or deli or the like. And here we are.”

John looks at her, a little slack-jawed, because it’s just as arousing to watch Mary deduce as it is on Sherlock, and damn.

Just, _damn_.

“I’m getting better at this,” Mary smiles wide, self-satisfied and a bit red in the cheeks with the exhilaration, and she doesn’t notice when Sherlock shifts, leans, and pecks a kiss against the corner of her mouth.

“Well done, love,” he murmurs, and Mary flushes all the deeper, beams all the wider.

And John, well: John’s a lucky sod, isn’t he?

A goddamned lucky sod if ever there was one.


	8. In Which Mary is the Patron Saint of Manchildren

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For [snogandagrope](http://archiveofourown.org/users/snogandagrope)'s request.

Mary sighs as she balances the cups of Lemsip—yes, _Lemsip_ , thank you kindly, Sirs _Just tea, Mary, really, whilst I moan over my raw throat_ and _Lestrade texted, there’s a case, but my eyes are all fuzzy, read me the message, but no, I’m not the least bit ill_

Idiots.

She groans as she remembers the soup; she carefully sets down the mugs and goes to the pot of broth on the stove, testing it on the tip of her tongue and frowning: it needs to be bland, of course, but _absolute_ tastelessness really isn’t necessary. 

She grabs for the spices—checks the labels twice and takes a careful sniff of each before she sprinkles, because for all that he’s _promised_ to keep the hazardous substances clearly marked, Mary knows Sherlock’s mind by now, knows how it gets rerouted and overcome by less tedious things than not poisoning people—and stirs, lets the soup simmer a bit longer, and grabs the Lemsip again, stealing her to re-enter the lion’s den.

Invaded Afghanistan. Staged his own death.

Still transformed into small children at the touch of a cold. 

She shakes her head. _Honestly_. 

If she didn’t love them both to pieces—yes, both of them, if she’s honest, and she’s an honest person, it’s a character flaw—she may have cajoled Mrs. Hudson into caring for their whingy hides, but she does love them, and frankly, it’s likely at least _partially_ her fault.

Partially, not entirely, because _someone’s_ transport would be much better suited fighting infection if it ate and slept, and someone _else_ would have at least an edge on the battle if he’d wear a bloody thicker coat in this weather.

At least Sherlock has that long twirly thing with the poppy-collar to keep his underfed skeleton warm. 

But the kids at school are a flailing cesspool of disease this time of year, and the amount of tissues and hand sanitiser she’s near-poured on their unwell little bodies is a bit uncanny, and while her own immune system’s toughened up over years of exposure to childhood ailments, she knows it’s at least possible that she brought something home with her that infected her doctor and his detective.

 _His_ detective. 

And aye, she thinks: there’s the goddamned rub.

Because she wants him to be _her_ detective, too.

And, truth is, Mary’s damn near _vibrating_ with impatience, with the need for John to wise up and face the fact that he’s head-over-heels with his flatmate-colleague-best friend-madman-brilliant-gorgeous fucking—

Sherlock. She’s quite impatient for him to just get _on_ with that realisation and do something about it, because a) the tension’s damn well suffocating. How anyone exists within a 100-metre radius of them without tripping over the tangible _want_ they exude is a mystery of the cosmos, a locked-door homicide doubled at least a million times.

And b) well, she’s only human: a hot-blooded female human with urges and wants, and a kind of fond desire for the impossible detective curled up on the sofa that makes her chest warm, makes her toes curl.

And once John finally accepts that he’s in love with Sherlock Holmes, Mary can helpfully head off the moral dilemma he’ll face because of his promises to her by simply saying, _What a coincidence! Me too._

Which, if she’s been correctly reading Sherlock’s appreciative gazes when she’s not-boring, could very well lead to nice cuddles on the sofa, at least.

Nice more-than-cuddles in the bedroom, at not-least.

She sighs, and sniffs at the Lemsip: still warm, but cooling, and that’s no good. 

She hurries in to tend to the Consulting Two-Year-Old and Mr. I’m-sore-but-it’s-fine-but-I’m-sore.

Only to find them, blissfully—finally—asleep.

But not just asleep.

Asleep on the sofa, the two of them scrunched together and dangling half-off, precarious but entirely oblivious to their plight. Asleep, pressed chest to chest and breathing deeply, heavily, scratchy in their lungs as they sniffle and shift and hold to each other. Asleep, veritably tangled up in each other’s limbs while Sherlock’s sweat-limp curls decorate John’s pale forehead and John’s open mouth—for the congestion in his nose—leaves a trail of wet on Sherlock’s collarbone.

Mary can’t be blamed for the way her heart twists with affection and want, just then, watching them breathe, and sleep, and breathe, and clutch to one another like the world’s ending, and quick. 

She sets the mugs down on the side table and settles in the chair, and smiles fondly at her beloved idiots, and thinks, _soon_.

It cannot possibly be much longer, now.


	9. In Which Mary is Mrs. Mycroft Holmes (or Mycroft is Mr. Mary Morstan—Oh, Yes; That's Much Better)

“Oh dear.”

The voice sends him leaping from the chair he’s slumped in, heart racing and limbs aching: he’d been sitting, staring, hollow, for so long.

“You’re something of a sore sight for eyes, aren’t you?” He hadn’t even heard the door open—hadn’t heard a knock if there’d been one; but there’s a woman inside the flat. Tall, but not towering. Lean, but solid. Short hair. Glittery earrings. A smart mauve coat over a grey skirt that hits at the knees—lovely calves highlighted by heels that look like they’re quite expensive, but maybe not: the big red stripe down the inside of the spike of them seems very out of place, in John’s mind.

Then again, this all seems very out of place in John’s mind.

“What the fu—”

“Come, John,” she says, unbuttoning her coat and setting a Tesco bag John hadn’t noticed her carrying onto the kitchen table. 

The clean kitchen table.

John’s heart twists; she eyes him pointedly.

“Time to start living again,” she says in a voice that sounds definitive. John almost nods, almost moves to comply with whatever she means, whatever she wants, except he’s not completely senseless, and his fingers are itchy, rather suddenly, for the weight of his Sig in their grip.

“Who in the hell are—”

“Shower first, John,” she cuts him off, starts unloading the groceries. “And no, it doesn’t make you a sad sap if you use his shampoo,” she adds over her shoulder as she puts away tea and a loaf of bread: both exactly where they should be, where they’d always been kept. 

“If he was here, he’d love it,” she continues, and John doesn’t know what to make of it, doesn’t know what to make of the way he feels safe with a stranger in his home, doesn’t know what to do with the way she talks about _Him_ as if she _knows_. “He’d deny loving it, of course, but he’d love it down to his toes.”

John doesn’t know what to do with the strangely-foreign feeling of his own heart in his chest, suddenly very present and war-torn, but full.

Still full, as if John could have forgotten that, could ever have overlooked all that was there, tattered but _real_.  
He shakes his head, tries to sort out the facts before him: strange woman, in the kitchen, without an invitation, stocking the cupboards.

There’s odd, and then there’s _odd_.

“I’m sorry,” John clears his throat; it has to have been days since he’s spoken, since he’s so much as breathed with any depth. “Just _who_ do you think you are, and _what_ are you doing in my flat?”

The woman smirks as she weighs a can of butter beans in her open palm. “At the moment, and for the foreseeable future?” she asks with a glint in her eye that’s familiar, except he can’t quite place it. 

“I’m the woman who’s going to make sure you don’t waste away of a broken heart right before our eyes.”

John blinks. Maybe it’s the grief, or the impact of that fucking bike messenger, or, or, god knows what.

Maybe it’s everything, or the lack of one thing in particular, but John can’t quite make heads of this, or tails. 

“Shower, John, truly,” the woman repeats, and eyes him shrewdly. “And put on something presentable.” Her gaze trails down his body before her expression scrunches and she sniffs with a bit of distaste, and _that_ expression’s known enough to John that it makes him feel ill, feel dizzy where he stands. 

“And socks,” she adds before she nods in apparent satisfaction. “I’ll order curries.” 

And that, it seems, is that. He starts to take a step toward the bath when he realises what it is he’s doing. He’s about to muster what little will he can find in the ruins when she’s just upon him, smelling of Chanel and elderflower. 

“Mary Morstan,” she reaches out a hand. “Mycroft’s wife.”

He stares at her, half-dumb, he suspects, if he’s being generous with himself. Her smile, small as it is, doesn’t falter as she grabs for his hand, limp at his side, and shakes it. 

“John—” she eventually urges him, eyebrow raised expectantly.

“Shower,” he says, caught in a haze of absolute flabbergasted fuckery that is and always will be his life, now, his heart splattered out on the pavement or no. “Right.”

He hopes there’s a goddamned towel clean.

_______________________________________

There’s a clean towel, but only vaguely clean clothes. He bides some time in the bathroom, hoping the steam will ease some of the wrinkles.

It’s a crap job, at best, but Mary approves.

“Much better,” she declares as he emerges, washed and dressed.

“I didn’t know Mycroft was married,” John crosses his arms and watches her retrieve two plates from the cabinet to her right.

“Few people do,” she says airily. “It’s not a traditional sort of thing. Neither of us are in a position where an exploitable weakness is favourable.”

She pauses in dishing out their takeaway. 

“But I fell in love with a madman, and he fell in love with a loon,” she eyes him with a knowing smirk. “You of all people should know that’s not the sort of thing you can walk away from.” 

John swallows hard around that, and takes the plate she offers before he sits across from her. 

At the clean table.

“You’re not eating,” is the next thing that he hears, and he stares at the woman across from him, who’s cleared half her plate: he doesn't know how much time’s passed to his staring, his empty gaze.

“I’m just—” he starts, but she shakes her head vigorously as she swallows the mouthful she’s chewing, and he cuts himself off before she can do the job. 

“I don’t mean now,” she clarifies. “You’re not eating properly. You’re isolating yourself.” Her eyes trail him, up and down, careful this time, and also full of care, somehow, and it rubs him wrong, puts him on edge: deduction and tenderness and he doesn’t know this woman, knows how he feels about Mycroft if nothing else.

Knows how much he’d wanted those two things, those very two things—deduction and _tenderness_ —to come his way from a different set of eyes.

“You’ve seen your therapist once since Sherlock’s funeral,” she informs him, and he’s suddenly in a warehouse with a psychosomatic limp all over again, and he hardens at that, tenses and sharpens at the edges around that memory. 

“And no, she is not the shining star of her profession, but neither is she the useless hack that some people would portray her to be,” Mary adds with a bit of a wink, but John’s having none of it.

It takes her half a moment, but she picks up the misstep quicker than most.

“You’re not sleeping,” she redirects, but this has gone on long enough.

“It’s been a pleasure meeting you, Mrs. Holmes,” John steels himself, his voice: schools his features because he wants to scream, he wants to sob, he wants to inflict damage upon something tangible that he can inspect later, deep in the night, and know that it’s real, he’s real, and that the pain that cuts him doesn’t grasp in vain.

“Ms. Morstan,” she corrects him, and she needs to leave, she needs to leave before he breaks.

“Ms. Morstan,” John concedes with a tight grin. “I think it’s time for you to leave.”

He stands, and moves to walk away, to retreat to Sherlock’s room and envelop himself in misery, and hopes like hell she’ll take the hint and be long gone by the time he surfaces again.

“What did you deduce?” Her voice stops him in his tracks.

He turns, and finds she’s on her feet, watching him with wide, open eyes.

“If Sherlock wanted to be a pirate, could have been a scientist, but became a detective instead,” Mary enunciates the possibilities with particular care, each one of them like a dagger in the gut: “What _would_ you deduce about his heart, John?”

John knows those words. John remembers that conversation, just below them, just—

“Who do you think watches when the Watchman ventures out into the wide world?” Mary cocks a brow at him, expectant: powerful. Not manipulative, exactly, but presumptuous: enigmatic to a point.

John’s heart, he suddenly finds, is pacing itself rather painfully.

“Can you guess what Sherlock wanted to be, after he outgrew piracy?” Mary asks.

“I’m not entirely sure he outgrew it, really,” and she laughs at that, genuinely.

“Touché,” she offers with a nod, and then a sigh.

“I met Sherlock when he was twelve,” she tells him, voice lilting, nostalgic. “He was a darling. Full of fire and passion. Brilliant beyond his years, of course.”

Yes, John can imagine. 

It nearly kills him to do it, but he can.

“I spent one summer with the family, early on,” she continues. “I remember it so clearly, the way Sherlock came to me, where I was reading in the garden. His eyes were bright, and I’d never seen so many colours staring at me, all at once,” she smiles, but it’s so very sad.

“He asked me,” Mary says, and he voice is terribly soft, “if I loved his brother. I told him yes, and that was true.” 

Mary blinks, and it lasts a second too long.

“Then he asked me how I knew,” she breathes deep. “I told him I knew because I didn’t know. It made sense to him, who was on his way to knowing so very much. To that mind of his still glazed with childhood, enamoured of mystery despite the need to solve.”

John’s lungs shudder, hesitant: he can feel the tension as it rises between them for what’s as-yet untold, what’s coming.

“And then he asked me, what it looked like, what part of the two of us was the love,” Mary whispers, and John can feel the flutter of his pulse in the tips of his fingers, it’s so fucking shrill. “So that he’d know it better, in making his observations, his deductions. In drawing conclusions about the world.”

Mary looks at him, then, her eyes almost pleading.

“I was young, John, you understand,” she says; “I was young, and for all of his genius, he was younger.”

Her shoulder heave on the inhale, and her voice is breathy, strained: 

“I told him love looked like falling from the sky and not knowing where you’d land, not knowing if you’d survive when the ground drew near but knowing, knowing that when you looked at the person you were falling _for_ ,” she swallows just as her voice makes to crack. “That when you looked at that person, love was knowing that your heart would have its chance to soar, nevertheless.”

They’re silent, after that. 

They’re absolutely silent, and John’s body feels weightless, John’s eyes can’t _see_.

“My husband, and my dear brother-in-law,” Mary finally speaks over the sound of John’s blood pounding fierce; “are, at present, labouring under a rather unfortunate delusion regarding your capacity to adapt and react accordingly in situations of a particular,” she sucks at her lip, tilts her head in consideration: “ _Urgency_ , shall we say.”

“They loathe _sentiment_ so desperately, say it clouds judgement and warps the mind,” she scoffs, shakes her head, and there’s a layer of regret in it, of sorrow. “It’d be laughable, the way they’re blinded by their own bias, if it weren’t so goddamned tragic.”

“They’re afraid to tell you the truth,” she laments, and John can read the conflict in her face, but he can’t process where this is going, what this means, what parts of him are thinking and wishing and hoping for without his conscious consent.

He can’t process why she’s talking about Sherlock in the present tense without traversing dark alleys in his psyche he can’t afford to get lost inside. Not just now.

“With the best of intentions, John, with all of the sentiment that either of them can possess,” she’s talking, still talking, and there’s a hint of desperation in her tone, now: if John knows how to recognise anything, these days, it’s desperation. 

“I want to make certain that you know that, and understand,” she carries on; “what they have done, and what they are doing, it’s because they believe it to be best, for _you_ , specifically.”

“But I think you’re capable of things they’re forgetting,” she adds in earnest. “I think they’re overlooking the clear truths of you because they’re terrified, and being who they are, what they are,” she shakes her head again, mournful. “They don’t know how to process it, to think through it and _observe_.”

Her eyes narrow meaningful upon John, and he feels the whole of him freeze.

“They don’t understand that sometimes it’s sentiment that saves everyone,” she murmurs passionately. “Love is an incomparable motivator, after all.”

John feels as if he might be sick.

“And I’ve been long-trained in the handling of a Holmes,” Mary tells him; “And this, well,” she smiles, but it’s so stretched with sorrow: “This is one of those times where to call them brilliant really means they’re terrible fools.”

John can’t speak, at that. John can’t blink.

“Sherlock’s alive, John,” Mary tells him, the words simple, slow, and clear. Honest to a fault.

John can’t breathe, at that. John’s heart can’t remember its rhythm.

“Sherlock staged his death to keep you safe,” Mary explains, and he’s half deaf to it; half transfixed. “And he has left London in order to make certain you remain that way,” she looks at him meaningfully, reads thoughts in his mind before even he can rein them in and make sense of them; “Which was an act of desperation, John. Don’t try to make sense of it beyond the fact that a man who shuns sentiment so viciously cannot be expected to survive being flooded with it irrevocably while maintaining so much as a modicum of sanity.”

John’s breath hitches, and it sears, but he doesn’t know that Mary hears it until she quiets, and studies him before gasping herself.

“You’re not thick enough to have missed how he loves you,” she whispers, incredulous; “Though,” she draws the word out long as she ponders. “You might be stubborn enough to have convinced yourself it’s all been in your head.”

Every touch, every look. Every laugh and every breathe. Every brush of hands and cup of tea and every lift of the tape at a crime scene. Every secret grin, just for him.

John knew he loved the bastard.

John knew just as surely that the bastard couldn’t love him back.

John’s been an idiot about lesser things, of course. John’s often been an idiot.

And _yet_ —

“That man is more devoted to you than I think any of us will ever understand,” Mary scolds him, just a tad despairingly. “You’re the work, and yet you’re all the things he pushed away for fear they’d wound him, and he’s beginning to see, because of _you_ , John,” and she leans in closer at that, makes certain that John understands: “Because of you he’s starting to see that his heart is a mighty thing, and that the wounds are sweet if you’re there to mend his breaks.”

And god, oh, _god_ , he’d mend them, he’d mend them with everything, with _everything_ but Sherlock is gone, Sherlock is dead, Sherlock’s heart isn’t his, it’s the ground’s, it’s the worms’, it’s—

“He’s working as we speak to make absolutely certain that it’s safe to return,” Mary pulls him forcibly from the darkness of his thoughts, his grief, and stares him down until he stares right back: “To _you_.”

She waits. She waits until his heart calms, until acceptance starts to bubble at this impossibility where it refused to rise from the truth of his own senses—compromised senses, he reminds himself. Shock, and perspective, and that bicyclist, oh _Christ_.

Mary waits until rage and indignation start to simmer alongside the first real tendrils of belief, before she continues, because that’s how she knows, how they both know.

Sherlock is _alive_.

“Which is why I am here,” Mary tells him simply. “I’m your scapegoat, so to speak.”

He looks at her, critically: he tries to read her meaning but falls short.

“I am your cover,” she expands the premise. “It’s not that I don’t think you’re capable of shamming just as well as Sherlock could, if given the proper incentive,” she smiles at him sympathetically: “Namely, the restitching of your poor heart at its seams, but I don’t think you should have to hide the joy of it. I don’t think you should have to poison the relief with secrecy, or with the darkness that your bitterness at his deception, however well meant it is, will become if you leave it to fester, if you don’t let it breathe.”

“I can be that for you, John,” she tells him softly. “I can be the reason, the outlet. Your friend, at first,” she watches him carefully as he focuses on inhaling, on exhaling, on inhaling again because this: “Your date. Your significant other. Your fiancée, if it comes to that.” 

He focuses on breathing, because Sherlock is breathing, and that makes it worthwhile.

“I can bring you your joy,” Mary murmurs gently, her eyes full of a generosity that John can’t quite fathom; “and no one need ever suspect.”

“Why?”

John asks the question before he can think about it, before he can stop, because he needs to know.

He _needs_.

“I’m an old romantic at heart,” Mary smiles wryly. “Ask Mycroft sometime about our honeymoon.”

John stares at her; says nothing. She sighs.

“I love Sherlock, too, John,” she confesses to him, with the heart of her. “I don’t want to have to hide how much it means that he’s still breathing in this world, that he’s still living, any more than you do.”

John exhales. Jesus _Christ_.

“And what does Mycroft think about all this?” he asks with a bite in it, because he needs defence against this: against the wash of feeling that’s threatening to steal the strength from his knees, to lay him low. 

Mary just smiles, almost serene.

“Another thing you should know well enough, John,” she says; “A relationship requires many things to succeed, two of which are love and trust.”

“My husband,” and it’s in that moment that John can read it plainly: the love and the trust this woman has for the British Government himself, and the reflection far beyond of those feelings from the British Government in kind: “He possesses both of those in spades, when it comes to me.”

For the first time in far too long, John feels like the world possesses substance; wears some colour. 

“What do you say, John?” Mary prompts, expectant.

John’s heart leaps because Sherlock.

 _Sherlock_.

“God,” John half laughs, half sobs, and he covers his mouth with his hands, and then his eyes before he looks at her, before he breathes out slowly and feels life in his limbs again.

“Oh god, _yes_.”


	10. In Which Mary is Very, Very Loved

The stairs, Mary laments in the echoing caverns of her exhausted mind. The stairs are just so _steep_.

She sighs, looks hopefully toward Ms. Hudson’s door—maybe the lovely woman will hear her little moans of achey sleeplessness and take pity upon her, help her with her overstuffed work bag up the steps, but alas: it’s clear she’s out for the weekend. Her sister’s. 

The universe, this evening, is not on her side.

She drags herself up the steps, her bag dragging and banging about behind her, catching on every stair. She sighs when she thinks about the holes she’s inevitably wearing into the bottom of said bag, but oh well: she’s been wanting to look for a new one. 

She hears the laughter as she slips her key into the lock: the hearty warmth of varying depths, and warmth begins to suffuse her, ease the tired weight in her limbs—her boys are home.

Her boys are home, and safe, and happy.

She opens the door, and if her smile is thin for her weariness, it’s a smile nonetheless.

It broadens, despite her need for rest, when she sees them: curled together, staring at each other with a glistening joy where they’re sprawled, chest to chest, heaving and giggling, wrapped around one another and soft, so soft when she looks at them, when she breathes out the world and thinks: _home_.

 _Thank god I’m home_.

Sherlock meets her eyes first, eyes bright and yet somehow they bright even more at seeing her, the smile on his lips quirking just a touch higher; but John’s the one who speaks:

“Mary!” And he says her name with such rampant feeling that it makes her tingly, even now.

She drops her bag and meets John halfway for a kiss. She searches for Sherlock, reaches for him but meets a cup of tea instead.

“You’re absolutely exhausted,” Sherlock observes with an affectionate concern that, when they’d first met, Mary could never have dreamed this genius man was capable of. He hands her the mug and kisses her, brief but full, and dear god, she thinks, as he leads her to the sofa and settles her with a blanket round her waist; she’s a touch blessed, isn’t she?

He cups her face and kisses her nose. “Rest a bit,” Sherlock damn well _nuzzles_ her cheek before he straightens, stands. “We’ll take care of dinner.”

It’s lovely, that she doesn’t even think to protest—that this all is comfortable enough, now, that she knows she doesn’t have to.

“The case?” she thinks to ask before she drifts a bit, though they’d been laughing: it had to have been a good one, all around.

John’s behind her, now, rubbing slow circles into her shoulder blades, and _oh_ , that’s _lovely_. 

“Solved and sorted,” he says softly; “Rest your eyes, darling, and we’ll tell you all about it over food.”

“Mmm, glad,” she murmurs, and relaxes into John’s rhythmic touch.

The universe, this evening, might just be on her side, after all. 

____________________________________

She wakes to the most delectable of scents.

“Mmmm,” she moans, eyes still closed. “Is that what I think that is?”

“What do you think it is?” the smooth baritone asks in response, amused.

“I think it’s the scent of a gorgeous, musky,” she enunciates longingly; “perfect, sweet,” and sure, the scent of Sherlock himself is there, near, and that’s lovely, _but_.

She cracks her eye open and grins at him.

“Scrumptious panna cotta?” 

He smirks back at her, bats her arm when she wraps her arms around his middle, breathing _him_ in, now, above the glorious scents of takeaway from Angelo’s. He leans to kiss her head and lets his arms settle around her for a moment before she sighs, contented, and he leads her to her feet.

“Evening, sleepyhead,” John greets her when she gets to the table, stifling a leftover yawn. “Long day, then?”

“ _Students_ ,” she says with thinly-veiled dismay, and John nods sympathetically. She’s complained enough for him to just _know_.

“Well, there’s wine,” he says, pouring her a glass that she gratefully takes. “And more food than we ordered, per usual.” 

She grins as John hands her a plate full of the Angelo’s alfredo, the best comfort food in the world.

“Oh, Angelo _loves_ me,” she says, twirling her fork around the fettucine.

“He does,” Sherlock confirms, quite serious.

“We get two candles there, now,” John agrees. “We _never_ got two, before.”

They eat, all of them—the case is closed, and Sherlock can indulge in more than the protein bars they’d finally talked him into whilst working, and it’s lovely, it’s so lovely, and she soaks up John’s enthusiasm about the work of the day, laughs and Sherlock’s pointed corrections in John’s entertainingly-emphasised version of events, and it’s wonderful.

It’s wonderful. It really, really is.

____________________________________

John turns in shortly after dinner, asks if either of them want to follow. Sherlock’s got a book in hand—new, from the looks of it, and kisses John goodnight for a good few minutes, slow and filled with a heart-twisting kind of adoration that Mary still loves to watch just as much as she loves to receive. Their hands on each other linger for a time before John turns to the bedroom, their bedroom, and Mary follows—part of her wishes Sherlock would, too, because it’s best when it’s the three of them: but just because the case is over doesn’t mean he’s in the mood.

Just because he doesn't come with them doesn’t mean he loves them any less.

That was one of the most beautiful revelations Mary’s ever known, when it came to her; when she finally saw it and understood what it meant.

She undresses John and settles atop him slowly, kisses down his chest as his hands run over her ribs, as he watches her in the dark with wide eyes, desire clear in the irises, the pupils. She kisses him long, deep as she sinks onto him, rides him at a lazy, aching pace as he cups her breasts and teases her nipples, as she clenches around him with every rock of her hips until she comes, and he follows for her trembling. 

They’re breathless, and Mary loves the feel of him so desperately, she could cry.

They’re quiet, and it’s gorgeous, and Mary never knew what bliss could _really_ be before she found this, before she found _them_ , and they all somehow became _more_.

“It was a good case,” John whispers against her jaw, groggy and warm; “He’ll want to tell you everything.”

She smiles, and her pulse picks up again in anticipation as she climbs out of bed and shrugs on her dressing gown.

“Sleep well, darling,” she kisses him, and John leans into it happily before she tucks the blanket in around him and eases the door closed.

____________________________________

She watches him, for a few longs moments, and falls in love all over again with the set of his shoulders, the expression of intent on his face.

Sherlock’s lips curl, suddenly, just before he looks up, meets her eyes.

“Come here, love,” he waves her closer, and she’ll never quite get used to the thrill it sends through her body, when Sherlock calls her _love_.

She curls in against him, head against the beating of his heart and he wraps an arm around her, sets aside his reading and breathes her in deep, the rush of it heady through the cavern of his chest at her ear.

She knows that he loves the smell of her, loves the smell of John on her. She smiles, and tucks herself into him just a tiny bit closer, just a tiny bit more.

“You’re still tired,” he murmurs, and she hears in move gloriously around his ribs.

“A bit,” and she is, but this is her favourite part of their cases, better even than witnessing the back-and-forth as John pecks out his factually-inadequate blog posts. 

“I can tell you everything tomorrow, you know,” he reasons with her. “It’s not as if I’ll forget.”

She shakes her head stubbornly. He’s quiet for a moment before he starts his account, stroking her hair all the while.

“Lestrade texted at seven-oh-three, Wednesday morning. Double homicide.”

She grins, and listens close. His voice is rich like honey, like chocolate, and the way he tells the stories is so achingly precise, his brilliance unadorned and sheer: it’s gorgeous.

She notices when he stops in the middle, just as John’s about to run out into traffic—she notices, of course, but it’s all delayed, belated.

He chuckles when she squeaks in protest and turns to him, accusing.

“Keep going,” she urges petulantly, even though her eyes are heavy.

“You’re falling asleep,” he tells her gently, fondly, as he brushes her hair from her eyes.

“I’m not,” she protests, but she knows it’s futile. 

“Keep going until I do fall asleep, then,” she says through a wide yawn. “You’ll tell me what I miss in the morning?” she asks, hopeful.

He leans down then to kiss her brow, but she leans up and presses her mouth to his lips instead. They stay that way for a good while, soft and easy, comfortable and warm. It’s brilliant. It’s always brilliant.

“Of course I will,” Sherlock promises when they part, and she settles back into him, pleased at the way his heartbeat’s just a bit quick against her cheek. 

His hands are in her hair again as he picks back up with his story and she grins, because the universe, this evening—most evenings; this _life_ —

The universe is most _definitely_ on her side.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My sincerest thanks to every single one of you lovelies for being adventurous enough to try this little experiment out and come with me through to the end.
> 
> Happy New Year, and Happy New Sherlock <3


End file.
